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The King is Dead

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Mecha Kaiju Sensō Tai!!!: There Have Always Been Dragons

Kwinn paused for a moment, surveying the Theodore Roosevelt
Memorial Hall before entering.The
Princess Kaji stood with her back to him, staring up at the stuffed and mounted
body of the giant ape that greeted visitors to the AMNH.Families and students drifted amongst the
exhibits.Kwinn Martin recognized a
Soviet agent and a pair of Red Chinese, but he knew they posed no danger today.

He walked up to the princess, taking his turn to admire the
lifelike remains of the Eighth Wonder of the World.Kong’s face was forever frozen in a defiant
roar, but his body was simply too massive to be posed with his arms raised, so
his body was bent humbly despite his fierce expression.Kwinn was reminded of the many Japanese he
knew.He turned to look at the young woman
he was meeting, who looked so Japanese but wasn’t at all.

Kaji looked up at the monster with pity in her dark, dark
eyes.She was as still as a mannequin
herself, standing with a poise and confidence that was anything but
humble.Her long black hair streamed
down her back, her skin was porcelain-pale, and her defiant tailored jacket and
trousers were snug to her shapely body.The words “stuffed and mounted” swam through Kwinn’s brain.

“The dinosaurs were killed by a time bomb,” Princess Kaji
said.

An image of a tyrannosaurus struggling to choose the green
wire or the red wire jumped through Kwinn’s overactive imagination.“I’m sorry?” he sputtered, thrown off-balance
by the non sequitur.

“A Time Bomb,” Kaji replied.She smiled down at him, not unkindly but perhaps with amusement.“With a capital T and a capital B.Several, actually.All simultaneous.”

She leaned in and kissed him, embracing him like a
lover.She smelled of cherry blossoms
and Kwinn Martin’s mind reeled with simultaneous images of viewing parties at
Ueno Park and meetings in D.C.He
embraced her back, enjoying this fleeting moment of impersonating a loving
couple.

“And what, exactly, is a Time Bomb?” he growled into the
princess’ ear.He gently bit her
earlobe, prompting a moan of pleasure from Kaji.She leaned back, evaluating him anew through
her dark, dark eyes.Her smile held
secrets and promises.

Princess Kaji took Kwinn’s hand – a comfortable and
overly-familiar gesture that belied her non-Japanese origins – and turned back
to look at the forever-growling ape again.“Gigantopithecus denham,” she
sighed, “Have you ever wondered how Kong and his kin went undiscovered for so
many years?”

“It’s not so odd,” Kwinn Martin replied, “The gorilla wasn’t
discovered until the middle of the nineteenth century.Why should somewhere as remote as Skull
Island not escape detection until the
Thirties?”

“An island swarming with prehistoric life?An island with plesiosaurs swimming
offshore?An island where Pleistocene
megafauna mixed with Cretaceous dinosaurs?” Kaji pulled Kwinn away from giant
ape and began walking into the Asian Mammals hall.“And what about Maple White Land?What about Mokèlé-mbèmbé?Doesn’t it seem suspicious to you that humankind never encountered dinosaurs
throughout the rest of recorded history, and then suddenly dinosaurs reappear
in the nineteenth century?”

Kwinn stopped and drew Princess Kaji closer.He looked up into her intense, war-haunted
eyes and felt her body shiver with emotion.He kissed her; it was impossible to not love her in that moment.

“I understand what you’re hinting at, Princess,” he said as their lips
parted.“This Time Bomb of yours blew –
debris? shrapnel? – into the space-time continuum.Shattered fragments of past ages landed in
the modern day.Your war for the future
killed the dinosaurs and caused casualties even into the twentieth century.

“Don’t be surprised that we didn’t notice.Mankind was in the midst of a great age of
discovery when we found these prehistoric survivors.Don’t forget: there have always been
dragons.”

“The Time Bombs fired back at Earth’s past by the future factions didn’t
just exterminate the species that ruled the Earth for 135 million years, they
devoured them.The nano-fusion warheads
tore millions – probably billions -- of dinosaurs and other animals apart at
the cellular level and stitched them back together into the daikaiju.Countless lives lost, holes in the time stream…

“It makes me angry, Mr. Martin.

“It makes me angry because I would do it again in a heartbeat if the
choice was mine to make.I would kill
that confused, time-lost beast we just passed again and again if it meant I
could save my future.

“In my future, there is no want.Humans are free to be explorers of their own hearts and minds, their own
bodies and souls.We visit distant
stars, we commune with life forms you can’t even imagine, we journey through
time and space…

“But for those of us who have volunteered to join the war – those of us
who have chosen to save the future for others -- there is endless, selfish
destruction.I think about the species
we have slain, the possibilities we have murdered in the name of our future and
I weep with shame and fury that it has been necessary.

“You might not have created G-Zero with your atom bombs, but the daikaiju
truly are humankind’s creation.”

Kwinn Martin drew Princess Kaji close.She cradled her head against his broad shoulder.He looked across the Asian Mammals hall and
caught the eye of a stuffed tanuki.Movement reflected in its glass eye and he shifted to watch the Red
Chinese agents approach, reflected in the exhibit’s windows.

Kwinn fished in his pocket for his other
pack of cigarettes and his lighter.Those
two should know better to interfere; Princes Kaji was a U. N. Intelligence
matter, and even the communists respected that.He withdrew from the embrace and began lighting a cigarette.The flint wouldn’t spark.

“Twentieth century addicts!Those
things cause cancer, Kwinn,” the princess exclaimed.She seemed about to say more when she noticed
the Chinese agents.Kwinn turned to face
them; Kaji balled her hands into fists.

“Not all daikaiju are yours, mammal!” barked one of the agents.He began to raise his arm, palm held outward,
a strange light glowing from his hand.

Kwinn bit the cigarette filter.The magnet-propelled dart erupted from the tobacco and buried exploded
through the agent’s eye.Princess Kaji
leaped forward and shattered the other agent’s eye with one powerful,
barehanded blow.

The disguise hologram that hid the agents’ true identities failed with
their sudden deaths.Kwinn suspected
that the circuitry must have been implanted in the would-be assassins’ skulls,
but he would have to ask Princess Kaji later.The woman from the future was staring aghast at the ruins of the
assassins’ heads.

They were unmistakably reptilian, though covered with fine, colorful
feathers instead of scales.They
reminded him strangely of the deinonychus skulls in dinosaur exhibits, despite
the swollen brain cases that rivaled a human’s in size.

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